Month: February 2013

Austin 2012-13 – Leilani’s Art

Leilani drew a lot of pretty and interesting pictures


After she misbehaved she wrote me this card



Austin 2012-13 – Other People’s Art

Leilani is still a bit young for the Legos, but hte adults liked to play with them:



I was so happy with the way my Christmas gifts – beach glass mosaics – had turned out, sadly the photos are blurry…
My little Christmas Angel:

The Blue Bird of Joy:

The Happy Tree:

Like most years I made a few scrapbook pages

This wreath I had made as a wedding decoration many years ago…

Rosemary had made these advent calendars for a charity while she was in France, and then bought this one back, and Andy remembers it from his childhood:

Austin 2012-13 – Baking Cookies

Rosemary had a lot of great activities for Leilani – here they are baking cookies:




The Crab (sad, don’t read if you cry easily)

We were at Lydgate at a friends Bd party, Leilani came running breathlessly. A boy has a crab, come quick mommy… i dropped everything and came along. I talked to him for 5 minutes, surrounded by 5 other kids, while the boy did not say a word, but kept playing with the crab, talking 2 legs off while we tried to get the crab. The Samoan kids were talking how it was OK to eat crab, but… The haole kids talked about pet crabs. Leilani tried to buy it for a handful of candy.

After i gave up another adult tried without any success, but after everybody walked away the boy dropped his – now useless – toy wrapped in a plastic bag. Leilani got it and brought it to me, and seeing its sorry shape really infuriated me. I tried to find the parents and when i could not sneaked away to put the dying crab back on the beach. Leilani saw me and came running, but when she saw the unwrapped crab started crying hysterically, I probably should have killed the poor creature to put it out of its misery, but I just held the sobbing Leilani.

We brought the crab to a more sheltered space where it hid under a log, and walking back Leilani picked up a big stick, and held it like a war club. I told her how violence breeds more violence and how it’s never a solution, how much trouble she could get into, and how much bigger the other kid was, and finally to aim for the nose… Nothing helped. I did not disarm her forcefully… Fortunately she is easily distracted and went for the birthday piƱata instead, and somebody got the war club and hid it in the meantime.

I did finally find the parents after talking to everyone at the beach, and while talking I realized that the kid was a girl (a full-on cross dressing 10 year old girl), and also realized that she’d be beaten up without further explanation, not so much for torturing the crab, but more for getting another adult upset enough to bother the parents. Gender equality or not, we always raise our girls to be more nurturing, while torturing animals is awful when a boy does it, by a girl is even more shocking.

And while I had assumed before that the kid was abused himself as hardly ever does a kid develop a cruelty like that without abuse, my anger and sadness had prevented me from looking deeper… at that point I saw the girls eyes, and it seemed to me someone had been ripping parts of her soul off, like she tore off the legs off the crab…

Leilani did not hear any of it, nor see it from up close, to her it mattered that I had found the parents and that they understood and that the girl would be punished, the harder the better, but I still feel haunted by her eyes.

Our Beautiful Hawaiian State Capitol (if they just would clean it once in a while…)

Hawaiian State Capitol presents itself to the visitors in all its beauty.

It was built to resemble a volcano, surrounded by an ocean, with columns like coconut trees.

Our ocean is in similar shape I think.

As you walk around the State Capitol you see the “Volcano” is crumbling in the surrounding water, just like Kauai, which makes me think the capitol is about 5 million years old.

I know, hard to see on the previous photo, that’s why I zoomed in.

State seal, original with chains and bird poop. The translation of the text means “The Life of the Land is Perpetuated in Righteousness”

It looks nice from that angle, but for a slightly different perspective from the same point I aimed the camera at the water and zoomed a bit…

…the water is filthy, trash floating and the next photo shows…

…a dead bird

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